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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:01:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Ted Cruz: Upon further review, Snowden is a traitor who should be tried for treasonhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/14/ted-cruz-upon-further-review-snowden-is-a-traitor-who-should-be-tried-for-treason/
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/14/ted-cruz-upon-further-review-snowden-is-a-traitor-who-should-be-tried-for-treason/#commentsThu, 14 Jan 2016 20:21:10 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3890149Nice catch by Michael Warren, spotting a very low-key quasi-reversal by Cruz on a natsec vulnerability. I say “quasi-reversal” because Cruz hedged on Snowden even when the first leaks began back in the summer of 2013. He never celebrated him — but he reserved the right to do so as more information came out. Nearly three years later, with Rubio hammering him over his supposed weakness in voting to replace the Patriot Act with the USA Freedom Act, Cruz is finally prepared to render his verdict: Thumbs down.

Weird place to do it, though — in a statement released to the NYT and buried deep within an otherwise prosaic “fact check” column. I wonder why Ted Cruz, who’s working overtime to woo Rand Paul’s libertarian base, wouldn’t want to make a big show of the fact that he now thinks Edward Snowden is a capital-T Traitor.

“If it is the case that the federal government is seizing millions of personal records about law-abiding citizens, and if it is the case that there are minimal restrictions on accessing or reviewing those records, then I think Mr. Snowden has done a considerable public service by bringing it to light,” Mr. Cruz said [in 2013] at an event hosted by TheBlaze, according to the website​​.

But that was not all Mr. Cruz said on the subject, as Mr. Rubio’s selective quotation might suggest. He also said this: “If Mr. Snowden has violated the laws of this country, there are consequences to violating laws and that is something he has publicly stated he understands and I think the law needs to be enforced.”

Since those quotes are from more than two years ago, we asked Mr. Cruz’s campaign how he now assessed Mr. Snowden. In a statement, Mr. Cruz took a very different tone, saying​,​ “​It is now clear that Snowden is a traitor, and he should be tried for treason.”

He pointed to his remark in 2013 that Mr. Snowden should be prosecuted if he broke any laws. “Today, we know that Snowden violated federal law, that his actions materially aided terrorists and enemies of the United States, and that he subsequently fled to China and Russia,” he said. “Under the Constitution, giving aid to our enemies is treason.”

Warren’s been asking Team Cruz for weeks for a comment about Snowden in reply to Rubio’s attacks, only to be met with stony silence. Finally Cruz spoke up. Any theories why? This data set from yesterday’s Selzer poll of Iowa may provide a clue. Which doesn’t belong and why?

On only two questions does Cruz see ominously high “unattractive” numbers. One is foreign-policy experience, but that’s probably baked in the cake for a freshman senator. The other is … voting to cut the military. That’s precisely the point of Rubio’s attack, to paint Cruz as comprehensively weak on national security, from his willingness to cut defense spending to his supposed softness on domestic surveillance. Cruz’s “treason” line on Snowden is meant to protect his right flank from Rubio. What happens when Cruz-supporting libertarians find out?

Actually, he’s been tossing some rhetorical candy at them lately too. Here’s a notable passage from his interview with U.S. News and World Report:

In Libya, Marco Rubio’s policy is indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s. And indeed in Syria, he’s making the same mistake – just like they are – of wanting to get involved in a Middle Eastern civil war where the consequence of their succeeding would be to hand the country over to radical Islamic terrorists. That is not conservative. That is, in fact, Wilsonian progressivism. This notion that America should promote democracy across the globe and intervene militarily to do so is in no way, shape or form conservative.

Most Americans would say it’s “Bushian neoconservatism,” but Cruz is smart enough to know that taking a dig at Dubya will probably hurt him more than help him in a Republican primary. Woodrow Wilson and progressivism are much safer targets. (Glenn Beck, in particular, talks about Wilson and progressivism regularly. Beck’s also been talking up Marco Rubio lately. I wonder if this Cruz soundbite wasn’t aimed specifically at him and his fans.) Either way, libertarians will relish this, probably enough to minimize any damage from the Snowden/traitor criticism. Say what you will about the man but he knows how to triangulate.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/14/ted-cruz-upon-further-review-snowden-is-a-traitor-who-should-be-tried-for-treason/feed/1143890149Poll: 63% now say it’s more important for feds to investigate terror threats than avoid interfering with privacyhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/19/poll-63-now-say-its-more-important-for-feds-to-investigate-terror-threats-than-avoid-interfering-with-privacy/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/19/poll-63-now-say-its-more-important-for-feds-to-investigate-terror-threats-than-avoid-interfering-with-privacy/#commentsMon, 19 Jan 2015 23:41:08 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3053409WaPo’s offering this as evidence that the public’s trending back towards security and away from privacy after Snowden’s heyday in 2013. It’s true, there is more support now for the former than there was 14 months ago; if Rand Paul was thinking of making opposition to the NSA a key piece of his campaign, this might give him pause. I think it’s more interesting, though, to see how strongly pro-security the public remained even after the surveillance bombshells first started bursting. Today, 63 percent say investigating terror is more important versus 32 percent who say it’s more important to prevent the government from intruding on privacy. In 2013, after the Snowden revelations, that split was … 57/39. Even at the height of public concern about the NSA, prioritizing privacy couldn’t crack 40 percent. Hmmm.

If that result displeases you, take heart in two facts. One: While you’ve lost ground, you haven’t lost as much as you might have expected to. After 18 months of worries about ISIS, and just two weeks after a horrible massacre in Paris, the split on security and privacy is pretty much where it was in 2013. Opinion on this subject may have hardened to the point where it’s largely impervious to new terror threats. Two: The partisan split is bound to change if/when the White House is back in Republican hands.

Democrats are even more gung ho about prioritizing counterterror over privacy than Republicans are, but partly that’s because they trust Obama to be conscientious about maintaining the balance. Put Ted Cruz in charge and see what happens to the numbers then. Democrats will immediately become more skeptical; Republicans who’ve come to sympathize with civil libertarian concerns partly due to distrust of O will surge back towards security. The topline numbers might not move much but I’ll bet they’ll move a bit towards privacy as liberals suddenly decide that questioning authority is cool again.

Dig down in the crosstabs and you’ll find two fascinating demographic divides. First, gender:

And age:

A 23-point spread between young adults and seniors. Wow. That’s good news for Team Rand insofar as they’re hoping to attract younger voters to his campaign, not so good news insofar as seniors are the GOP’s base. The gender divide is more interesting, though: Why would women be so much more likely than men to prioritize counterterror over privacy? Reminds me of the huge gender gap in last week’s YouGov poll on Charlie Hebdo and whether publications should engage in religious blasphemy. Men were consistently much more likely to side with those who publish provocative images than women were. I wonder if there’s a connection there: If you worry about security, it stands to reason that you might want to do everything you can to reduce the threat of terror — whether that means subordinating privacy interests or discouraging magazines like Charlie Hebdo from provoking the aggrieved. Or, since we’re playing armchair psychologist, maybe it’s a function of women being comparatively more communitarian than men are. Men side more with the individual who wants to publish offensive cartoons and with the individual who wants to be free of government surveillance. Women, more concerned about the threat to the public at large, are willing to prioritize those individual concerns a bit less. Or so you might think. Any other explanations? None of these are very satisfying.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/19/poll-63-now-say-its-more-important-for-feds-to-investigate-terror-threats-than-avoid-interfering-with-privacy/feed/913053409Democratic fault lines: Hillary knocks Snowden for fleeing to Russiahttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/25/democratic-fault-lines-hillary-knocks-snowden-for-fleeing-to-russia/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/25/democratic-fault-lines-hillary-knocks-snowden-for-fleeing-to-russia/#commentsFri, 25 Apr 2014 20:01:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=305907She never calls him a traitor, notes National Journal, but she goes right up to the line:

I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally—drained, gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like.

Why should you care? For two reasons. One: Like it or not (i.e. not), this may be a policy preview of the next presidential administration. She doesn’t say explicitly that she’d preserve NSA surveillance as is (she pays lip service at the beginning to privacy, as all politicians do when addressing this subject) but her concern here obviously has much less to do with domestic data-mining and much more to do with Snowden absconding with state secrets. In fact, she wonders aloud why he didn’t stay put and seek legal protection for his disclosures under whistleblower laws — a sore point for Snowden and his supporters since day one. Meaningful whistleblower protections don’t exist, Snowdenites insist (and not without reason); he would have suffered nasty retaliation in the U.S. and maybe even prison. It’s not even clear that his disclosures would qualify as “whistleblowing” since, after all, the NSA’s programs are legal unless and until the Supreme Court decides the Fourth Amendment says otherwise. Hillary surely understands all that. The fact that she’d resort to that argument anyway shows you just how unsympathetic to him she is.

Two: It’s going to be fascinating watching Democrats wrestle with Snowden’s legacy during the 2016 campaign, especially if they nominate a would-be hawk like Hillary. The principled lefties among them are irritated that the party’s veered from criticizing Bush for threatening civil liberties with mass surveillance to defending Obama for doing the same. The rest of the party trusts Obama to be a responsible actor and thus tolerates surveillance — so long as it’s overseen by a Democrat. Nevertheless, as of January, Democrats as a group were turning sour on NSA spying just as the rest of the country was. Back in June 2013, when Snowden first emerged, they supported the NSA 58/38. As of January 2014, it was … 46/48. That’s why Hillary’s so keen to change the subject here from the NSA itself to Snowden running away to Mother Russia with the keys to the security castle. When you ask people about that, things get … complicated:

Here’s what happens in the same poll when you ask people whether Snowden’s leaks were the right or wrong thing to do. Top line is “right,” second line is “wrong,” third line is “not sure”:

Good news for Hillary the Hawk: A plurality of Dems (identical to Republicans, in fact) think it was the wrong thing to do. Bad news for her: Young adults, on whose turnout Democrats increasingly depend, are conspicuously pro-Snowden. The trick in the Democratic primaries for Team Clinton is finding a sweet spot where she’s critical of Snowden, to prove that she’d be “tough” as commander-in-chief, but not so critical of his revelations that she’d alienate the lefties who are already suspicious of her and the young voters whom the party needs. Here’s her first stab at it.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/25/democratic-fault-lines-hillary-knocks-snowden-for-fleeing-to-russia/feed/73305907Snowden: I asked Putin that softball question on surveillance to start a public debate in Russiahttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/18/snowden-i-asked-putin-that-softball-question-on-surveillance-to-start-a-public-debate-in-russia/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/18/snowden-i-asked-putin-that-softball-question-on-surveillance-to-start-a-public-debate-in-russia/#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 21:01:32 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=305098And you know how famous Russia is for robust public debate.

The investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, perhaps the single most prominent critic of Russia’s surveillance apparatus (and someone who has repeatedly criticised me in the past year), described my question as “extremely important for Russia”. It could, he said, “lift a de facto ban on public conversations about state eavesdropping.”

Others have pointed out that Putin’s response appears to be the strongest denial of involvement in mass surveillance ever given by a Russian leader – a denial that is, generously speaking, likely to be revisited by journalists…

When this event comes around next year, I hope we’ll see more questions on surveillance programs and other controversial policies. But we don’t have to wait until then. For example, journalists might ask for clarification as to how millions of individuals’ communications are not being intercepted, analysed or stored, when, at least on a technical level, the systems that are in place must do precisely that in order to function. They might ask whether the social media companies reporting that they have received bulk collection requests from the Russian government are telling the truth.

The most interesting thing about this is how different the tone of the op-ed is from his interaction with Putin on TV. In the Guardian, which caters to an English-speaking western audience, he insists that he asked the question about surveillance because he knew that it “cannot credibly be answered in the negative by any leader who runs a modern, intrusive surveillance program.” He knew there’d be “serious inconsistences” in Putin’s “evasive” answer; he even links to this Guardian piece published before the Olympics confirming that, yes indeed, Russia conducts mass surveillance. Essentially, Snowden’s spinning his pattycake session with Czar Vladimir yesterday as some sort of J’Accuse because that’s the image that he needs his defenders in the west to believe.

On Russian TV, though, at a press event Putin organized for domestic consumption, all of that was absent. Snowden asked, straightforwardly, whether Putin conducts NSA-style surveillance and the czar, true to form, cheerily lied. Which is how it had to be: He couldn’t have asked an accusatory question because the Kremlin doesn’t allow robust debate, especially on state media and especially when Putin’s busy nurturing a nationalist siege mentality vis-a-vis the west over Ukraine. Imagine watching that exchange as a Russian citizen and seeing a guy who fled to Russia for safe haven from the sinister United States asking Putin placidly whether he spies on innocents, before being reassured that he doesn’t. What would you take from that? Would it make you suspicious of Russian surveillance, or would you be impressed that Putin’s willing to field a question like this from a dissident whom even the U.S. government couldn’t tolerate? Snowden wants you to believe that he somehow put Putin on the spot, but if he’d truly done that, you can guess what would have happened to him:

Putin’s approach to propaganda has been to tightly control television—which, in most of Russia, is the only media there is—while granting wider latitude to the remote and unpopular elites who communicate in print and online. Snowden is now taking part in this process. He played the dutiful courtier on TV, where he was seen by tens of millions of Russians; he expressed his tentative and circuitous criticisms in an English-language foreign newspaper.

Yet even in print and in English, Snowden is participating in and lending his support to a massive lie. Russian journalists will not “revisit” (as he puts it) the truthfulness of Putin’s answers. Russian journalists who do that end up dead, in at least 56 cases since 1992. Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who pressed Putin hardest, was shot dead in her own apartment building in 2006, after years of repeated arrests, threats, and in one case, attempted poisoning.

As for “civil society”: Snowden is writing at a time when Russian forces have invaded and conquered Crimea. Russian-backed forces have attacked and abducted journalists on the peninsula and shut down independent news outlets. People who have resisted the annexation have disappeared, then reappeared dead, bearing signs of torture. To write about Russia as a normal state, in which normal methods exist for discovering and discussing truth, is to share culpability for a lie—and a lie that, at this very moment, is shattering the peace and security of all of Europe.

Right. Snowden’s core value as a propaganda asset is to let people like Putin claim moral equivalence with the United States in all matters of civil liberties by claiming equivalence (or superiority, per Putin) on surveillance matters in particular. It’s not true, but it’s useful. The irony of Snowden insisting that he somehow trapped Putin in a lie is that Putin’s spoken approvingly of NSA surveillance before, in his own state media, and on more than one occasion. Last summer, shortly after Snowden’s leaks began, he called mass surveillance “generally practicable” and said that as long as there are some legal safeguards, “That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism with modern-day technology.” Six months later, in December 2013, he said that the NSA program is needed to fight terrorism and quasi-joked that he envies Obama for being able to get away with it. He’s not telling Russians, in other words, that mass surveillance is a grievous abuse with little use in protecting the state; he’s telling them the opposite — in which case, how damaging would it really be if Snowden’s dream came true and Putin’s lie was exposed? If, somehow, Russian media did feel emboldened enough to uncover Russian surveillance and, for whatever reason, they weren’t censored or killed, what leads Snowden to think there’d be a massive outcry? Putin would simply justify it as necessary to fight the west’s campaign of subversion and most of the public would go along. Either Snowden knows that or he doesn’t, but he asked his question anyway. Which is worse?

Exit question for Russia experts: Would a population whose adults grew up in the Soviet Union really be that sensitive to revelations that they’re being spied on en masse by Moscow? Don’t they assume they’re being spied on already and that Putin’s lying to them, just as their leaders always have?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/18/snowden-i-asked-putin-that-softball-question-on-surveillance-to-start-a-public-debate-in-russia/feed/60305098American super-patriot to Putin: Russia doesn’t conduct mass surveillance like the U.S. does, right?http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/17/american-super-patriot-to-putin-russia-doesnt-conduct-mass-surveillance-like-the-u-s-does-right/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/17/american-super-patriot-to-putin-russia-doesnt-conduct-mass-surveillance-like-the-u-s-does-right/#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 15:21:41 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=304896Ed flagged this earlier but I want to make sure people see the clip. Apparently not even Snowden journalist/spokesman Glenn Greenwald knew this was coming, since here’s the best he could do this morning by way of spin:

Snowden should storm the Kremlin, take their surveillance docs & demand to be sent to the US: just like his brave patriotic critics would do

Only two possibilities here. One: There’s an FSB agent out of frame with a gun pointed at Snowden’s head, just to make sure that he reads the cue card as written. In that case, decide for yourself how likely it is that Snowden’s refused to share any U.S. state secrets with Russian intel. Two: He’s doing this cheerfully, either at Putin’s request as a condition of his asylum or at his own request, to exploit a Putin press conference as a way to further needle the NSA. Whatever the answer, the stark fact is that he’s asking a question here which he knows — absolutely knows — will generate a self-serving lie told by a guy who embodies the type of fascism that Snowden claims to abhor. For your information, the name of Russia’s mass surveillance program, a.k.a. “PRISM on steroids,” is the System of Operative-Investigative Measures, or SORM. Via Joshua Foust, they’ve been using it for years but lately, as in so many other ways, they’ve gotten more aggressive with it. A taste:

But the Russian surveillance effort is not limited to the Sochi area, nor confined to foreigners. For years, Russian secret services have been busy tightening their hold over Internet users in their country, and now they’re helping their counterparts in the rest of the former Soviet Union do the same. In the future, Russia may even succeed in splintering the web, breaking off from the global Internet a Russian intranet that’s easier for it to control.

Over the last two years, the Kremlin has transformed Russia into a surveillance state—at a level that would have made the Soviet KGB (Committe for State Security) envious. Seven Russian investigative and security agencies have been granted the legal right to intercept phone calls and emails…

In 2011-2012, while protesters flooded Moscow’s streets, the phones of a number of Russian opposition leaders and members of the State Duma were hacked. Recordings of their private telephone conversations were even published online. On December 19, 2011, audio-files of nine tapped phone calls of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and now a prominent opposition leader, were posted on the pro-government site lifenews.ru. Nemtsov requested an official investigation. As yet, none of the leakers have been found or prosecuted, and the official investigation has not identified a single culprit.

Such victims have no doubt they were bugged and filmed by security services, but only in the fall of 2012 did the first clear indication emerge that SORM was used to wiretap opponents of President Vladimir Putin. On November 12, 2012, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the right of authorities to eavesdrop on the opposition. The court ruled that spying on Maxim Petlin, a regional opposition leader in Yekaterinburg, was lawful since he had taken part in rallies that included calls against extending the powers of Russia’s security services. The court decided that these were demands for “extremist actions” and approved surveillance and telephone interception.

They’ve used SORM more frequently lately to try to sniff out any Arab-Spring-like protest movements before they get traction. And they’ve complemented their surveillance by censoring hundreds of disfavored websites, no doubt concluding that silencing critics altogether is a more efficient way to neutralize them than monitoring their communications systematically. In fact, the authors of the piece quoted above speculate that Snowden’s main propaganda value to Russia is to help put pressure on popular American sites like Facebook to create separate Russian sites if they want to serve Russian customers. Facebook can’t be trusted so long as it’s being penetrated by the NSA — but it can absolutely be trusted, you see, once it’s being hosted on Russian soil and being penetrated by the FSB (assuming it hasn’t been already). That, presumably, explains Snowden’s softball question to Putin today. Putin wants to assure Russians, surreally, that their data is safer with him than it is with American websites. Who better to tee him up for that question than noble American super-patriot Edward Snowden, the man who blew the lid off NSA surveillance?

Imagine the mindset it takes to pose a question like this, in all apparent earnestness, to someone who’s spent the past two months pretending that the professionally-outfitted soldiers who’ve appeared in Crimea and eastern Ukraine are homegrown “pro-Russian activists.” That’s such an egregious lie, it barely qualifies as a lie; there’s no real intent to deceive behind it, just a formalistic refusal to accept responsibility. Snowden’s seen a news report or two about it, I take it, and yet here he is, pitching his benefactor the softball of softballs. You’re welcome, Vladimir.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/17/american-super-patriot-to-putin-russia-doesnt-conduct-mass-surveillance-like-the-u-s-does-right/feed/84304896Gallup: For the first time, majority of Americans think foreign leaders don’t respect Obamahttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/24/gallup-for-the-first-time-majority-of-americans-think-foreign-leaders-dont-respect-obama/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/24/gallup-for-the-first-time-majority-of-americans-think-foreign-leaders-dont-respect-obama/#commentsMon, 24 Feb 2014 16:21:24 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=298497For most of his term a slim majority said yes when asked whether they thought foreign leaders respected him — impressive resilience, really, for a guy who was pilloried for blowing hot and cold first on Mubarak’s ouster and then on Morsi’s. Sunni leaders certainly didn’t respect O for that, but then who cares what the oilbags in Saudi Arabia think? Last year, though, the bottom dropped out: Now he’s at 41/53 on the “respect” question. It’s not Republicans who’ve soured on him, either, as they never thought much of O’s international leadership in the first place. It’s independents and even Democrats who’ve lost that Hopenchangey feeling:

My first thought when I saw that was Syria. He was so roundly humiliated by his “red line” last fall, first announcing an attack, then backing off to punt the issue to Congress, then allowing Vladimir Putin of all people to bail him out with a phony disarmament compromise, that even center-lefties can’t escape the conclusion that The One doesn’t know what he’s doing. But then I wondered — how closely did the public follow the whole Syria saga? I know O ended up giving a short primetime speech on it, but I’m skeptical that any foreign policy decision that doesn’t result in war penetrates the public’s consciousness too deeply. I think his falling numbers might be an accumulation of things: Syria, certainly, but also Snowden’s revelations about the NSA data-mining abroad and spying on foreign leaders like Angela Merkel. And there’s surely some irritation over his nuke deal with Iran baked in the cake, especially among strong supporters of Israel. Even Canada’s annoyed with him for his endless dithering on the Keystone pipeline. David Cameron seems to like him okay, I guess. Who else?

Here’s the graph that blew my mind. Americans’ satisfaction with the country’s place in the world goes south under Bush as the Iraq war drags on — but it never recovers. Compare the numbers in 2007, at the height of sectarian violence in Iraq, to the numbers today.

Identical. Nothing Obama’s done, including total withdrawal from Iraq, has moved the needle much; last year’s modest improvement was, I suspect, more a boost he got after his election than a reaction to anything that happened abroad. I’m tempted to say that some of this is a response to the lack of U.S. leverage over the Arab Spring, but that doesn’t work. The numbers are almost the same from 2010, before the revolution in Egypt, to 2012. Maybe there’s simply nothing the White House can do to improve this metric short of winning a war or riding a major economic recovery. The latter would at least restore some sense among the public that “America’s back” rather than an empire in decline.

Exit question: Will numbers like this make O more or less inclined to be bold vis-a-vis Ukraine and Venezuela? Maybe he figures he should cut his losses and not challenge Putin to another game of chess. Checkers, i.e. approving Keystone, seems hard enough for him. But then, there’s nothing happening domestically for the rest of the year, and maybe for the rest of his term if Republicans can’t put something together on immigration. That’s why lame-duck presidents tend to focus on foreign policy in their last years in office. If/when the Iran nuke detente falls apart, he won’t have much of a legacy abroad either. Maybe a firm line on Ukraine against Putin will be his way of recovering some respect.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/24/gallup-for-the-first-time-majority-of-americans-think-foreign-leaders-dont-respect-obama/feed/96298497On second thought: Homeland Security drops plan to track Americans’ license plateshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/19/on-second-thought-homeland-security-drops-plan-to-track-americans-license-plates/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/19/on-second-thought-homeland-security-drops-plan-to-track-americans-license-plates/#commentsThu, 20 Feb 2014 01:01:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=298046Fine, but it’s a perverse reality that the Snowden leaks have made me more of a fatalist about these things. If they’re dropping the license plate database, I suspect it’s not because they think they’ve crossed some line of propriety. It’s because there are more efficient ways, either already extant or under development, to track people’s locations. The progress of surveillance technology is remorseless.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday ordered the cancellation of a plan by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to seek a national license plate tracking system…

The idea behind the national license-plate recognition database, which would have drawn data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, was to help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the plan raised concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

“The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of ICE leadership, has been cancelled,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement. “While we continue to support a range of technologies to help meet our law enforcement mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.”

Here’s Ed’s post on the license plate plan from this morning. What’s a more efficient way than scanning plates to track someone’s whereabouts? By their cell phone, of course, a program the NSA spent two years quietly testing in 2010 and 2011. That’s not a perfect solution, needless to say; sometimes you won’t know a target’s phone number, just their plate. But as the feds’ ability to process information grows, there may be workarounds for cars. E.g., if you had comprehensive DMV records and auto manufacturer records, you might be able to match a particular plate to a particular VIN and then that VIN to a serial number for some electronic component of the car that could be tracked remotely. It’s the same point I made earlier in the “smart gun” post about the “Internet of things.” In the near term, even basic appliances will be able to communicate with each other. Cars already do, in fact. If the feds can, with a little effort, read your e-mails, presumably they’ll figure out a way to “listen” to your car too and zero in on its location without needing to read the plate. And in the slightly longer term, as wearable tech like Google Glass and smartwatches catch on, it’ll be easier to track you personally. All of this seems to me unavoidable. Even if public pressure convinces Congress to close off some channels of surveillance, capacity through other channels will grow and make up the difference.

The one novelty of the license plate program, I think, is that it was under DHS’s umbrella, not the NSA’s. Not only that, but they were seeking to justify it as a weapon in the fight against — ahem — illegal immigration. That’s an unusually draconian step for a government controlled by a party that’s already under fire from immigration advocates for being too aggressive in deporting illegals, and which stands to benefit politically from higher rates of illegal border-crossing. Maybe this was a halting first attempt at bringing massive surveillance dragnets out of the realm of counterterrorism and into the area of more mundane law enforcement and DHS simply miscalculated how the public would receive it after nine months of Snowden-driven upset. Too soon. For now.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/19/on-second-thought-homeland-security-drops-plan-to-track-americans-license-plates/feed/52298046Pew poll: Obama losing the public on NSA surveillancehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/20/pew-poll-obama-losing-the-public-on-nsa-surveillance/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/20/pew-poll-obama-losing-the-public-on-nsa-surveillance/#commentsMon, 20 Jan 2014 23:01:21 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=294185Does it matter, though? As you scan the numbers, bear in mind that when Pew asked people whether they’ve heard anything about O’s speech on NSA reform last Friday, just eight percent said they’d “heard a lot.” There was no shortage of news coverage about it; if you only heard a little — or nothing at all, as 50 percent of those sampled said — it’s probably because you’re just not paying much attention to this subject.

The public went from evenly split last summer, when Snowden’s revelations first broke, to 40/53 against. Maybe more importantly, it’s Obama’s own base that’s seen the sharpest reversal, with black and Latino voters who gave him the benefit of the doubt at first now disapproving mildly of NSA surveillance. (In fact, not a single demographic group at this point shows more support for the practice than opposition.) No matter how many speeches O gives in its defense, the drip-drip of new Snowden leaks is drowning his message, which is why suddenly we’re seeing stories like this one leaked to major papers like the Journal. We’ve passed the point on this where Obama can trust his most loyal supporters to circle the wagons for him. “Obama says the program works” isn’t good enough, even for Democrats. He’s got to show his work, if he can.

Or does he? How much pressure is Obama really under if only eight percent can be bothered to stay on top of a presidential speech about new reforms? Seems to me the significance of the Pew numbers is less about O needing to make further reforms than the fact that this is now likely to be a 2016 issue for both parties. The largest number in that table, after all, is the amount of opposition to surveillance among tea partiers — 68 percent, where no other group is above 60. That’s litmus-test territory for right-wing candidates in the primaries, which is one reason why Ted Cruz is demanding “far more protection for law-abiding citizens” under the program. The most conservative candidates in 2016 will all be flavors of Rand Paul on this issue.

Interestingly, though, non-tea-party Republicans have also moved from slight support on balance for the program to double-digit opposition, which complicates the expectation that the GOP’s establishment candidate will be vociferously pro-NSA. Same thing on the left — Democrats are against surveillance only very narrowly on balance, but that’s because it’s their guy whose name is on the program right now. That dynamic will change as O’s presidency winds down; as noted, it’s already changed among Democratic blocs like blacks and Latinos. Hillary will thus have good reason to call for reforms, as will Christie or Jeb or whoever emerges from the center of the GOP. And of course, so will Rand Paul or Cruz or whoever wins the tea-party primary. The only question in the primaries, increasingly it seems, is how ambitious the scope of reform will be. Can’t expect much from either the Democratic or Republican establishment on that point, but maybe, given the relative public disinterest in the topic, the public will take what it can get.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/20/pew-poll-obama-losing-the-public-on-nsa-surveillance/feed/57294185Open thread: Sunday morning talking headshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/19/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-109/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/19/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-109/#commentsSun, 19 Jan 2014 13:01:42 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293990It’s wall-to-wall NSA coverage this morning in honor of Obama’s pretend-reform speech on Friday, featuring the same stable of Sunday-show mainstays that are always booked for this topic — Dianne Feinstein, Mike Rogers, Michael Hayden, and a few former Obama staffers like Tom Donilon and Mike Morell. As far as I know, with the sole exception of Mark Udall on “Face the Nation,” not a single guest appearing this a.m. wants a major overhaul of the agency.

The one significant deviation from the script is “This Week,” which will have Stephanopoulos interviewing Vladimir Putin about Olympic security, Snowden, Obama’s embarrassing amateurishness on Syria, and the many political benefits at home and abroad of demagoging gays. The full line-up is at Politico.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/19/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-109/feed/41293990Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/quotes-of-the-day-1617/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/quotes-of-the-day-1617/#commentsSat, 18 Jan 2014 01:11:31 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293941In overhauling the nation’s spy programs, President Obama vowed on Friday that he “will end” the bulk telephone data program that has caused so much consternation — “as it currently exists.”

[F]or a president who came to office promising to end what he considered the excesses of the new security state, Mr. Obama’s speech on Friday was as much about the larger question of faith. Rather than throw out the programs at issue, he hoped to convince the public that they are being run appropriately.

2) It will be kept, at least in the short-term, by the government until Congress figures out what to do with it. (And don’t think the telecom lobby won’t play a role in that.)

3) It will be searched.

4) Searches will be approved by a court with a record of being friendly to the government, one without a new privacy advocate.

5) National security letters can still be issued by the FBI without a court order.

6) Much of this activity will remain secret.

***

As a 2008 candidate, Barack Obama regularly castigated then-President George W. Bush for what he called excessive surveillance programs. Joe Biden, now Obama’s vice president, criticized former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s GOP presidential platform at the time as little more than “a noun, a verb and 9/11.”

Yet Sept. 11 played a starring role in Obama’s justification of the signals intelligence program during his Friday speech about National Security Agency reforms. The president invoked Sept. 11 eight times Friday, saying the attacks on New York and the Pentagon justify and demand maintaining a robust surveillance apparatus to keep the nation and its allies safe.

It’s the latest in Obama’s evolution from a critic of those who used Sept. 11 to justify national security procedures to a leader who uses the attacks to defend his administration’s surveillance policies.

***

“We heard a lot of lies in this speech by Obama,” Assange said. “I think it’s embarrassing for a head of state to go on like that for 45 minutes and say almost nothing.”…

Assange said the speech wouldn’t have happened without the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who disclosed the details of these programs. Obama was “dragged, kicking and screaming” to the address, Assange said.

“Although those national whistle blowers have forced this debate, this president has been dragged, kicking and screaming to today’s address. He is being very reluctant to make any concrete reforms,” he said. “Unfortunately today we also see very few concrete reforms.”

Obama is just pushing the debate further down the road, Assange said, by delegating some of these decisions to a divided Congress and panels of lawyers.

***

“What I think I heard is that if you like your privacy, you can keep it,” Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “But in the meantime, we’re going to keep collecting your phone records, your email, your text messages and, likely, your credit card information.”…

“He mentioned Paul Revere. But Paul Revere was warning us about the British coming,” Paul said. “He wasn’t warning us that the Americans are coming.”

Later in the interview, Paul said he’s opposed to all massive data collection, by both the federal government and the private sector. Beyond civil liberty concerns, Paul said such massive surveillance just isn’t practical.

“Who are we going to hire, [Edward] Snowden’s contractor to hold all the information?” Paul said, laughing at his own joke.

***

If I understand Obama’s new policy on Section 215, he is going to have the Executive Branch ask the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to begin to limit when the Executive can query the Section 215 database. That is, he will ask the judiciary to take on a new power to limit the Executive, so that the Executive can only query the database when the executive gets a court order signed by the FISC. In his words, “I have directed the Attorney General to work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court so that during this transition period, the database can be queried only after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency.”

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but doesn’t Congress need to be involved in this little enterprise? The FISC is a creation of Congress. It has no power to do anything that Congress doesn’t grant it. The Executive and the Judiciary can’t just meet and agree on a new set of rules to govern surveillance programs; those rules are supposed to be generated by Congress. I suppose it shows how far from Congress’s text the FISC has taken the law that the Executive sees the FISC as the primary negotiating partner in creating new rules. The FISC’s interpretation of Section 215 is based on an implausible reading of Congress’s law, so it’s almost like it’s the FISC’s authority at issue, not Congress’s. But I hope we could recognize that FISA is a statute and statutes are enacted by the legislature. If the President and the FISC are having trouble locating this sometimes-elusive branch of government, they’re in the fancy building with the dome near the Supreme Court. Big building, can’t miss it.

***

Obama cannot have it both ways. Either the government’s mass collection of every American’s telephone records is essential to national security, or it isn’t. Either the surveillance activities that ignited public outrage when they were revealed last June amount to nothing more than a “modest encroachment” that “the American people should feel comfortable about,” as Obama claimed at the time, or they pose substantial threats to privacy that need to be mitigated, as he indicated today. Either the reforms he announced will protect Americans from indiscriminate snooping, or they are mere window dressing aimed at “giv[ing] the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected” (as he put it today) without actually protecting those rights.

Obama did manage to utter at least one important truth:

“Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has seen too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.”

While Snowden initially represented his priorities as being those of American civil liberties and the exposure of spying on American citizens, the leaks quickly turned into tales exposing the legitimate spying activities external to the United States…

Today was a victory for Snowden and his allies, but not the kind of victory civil libertarians should hope for. The restrictions on spying on American citizens announced by the president seem mostly like window dressing, adding a few hoops and a mess of paperwork to slow down the process without achieving fundamental change. But if the restrictions on spying overseas are real, and not just lip service, they represent a marked degradation of the ability of America’s intelligence community to do the job they’ve been tasked with from the beginning.

This should please Snowden and his allies. Their aim, rather than ensuring the protection of civil liberties, has turned into a broader push to restrict the footprint of the intelligence gathering efforts of the United States. It’s now a reality only made possible because of their appeal to a power structure that essentially shares their view of the proper role of America in the world.

***

***

***

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/quotes-of-the-day-1617/feed/354293941American spies: Snowden deserves to diehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/american-spies-snowden-deserves-to-die/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/american-spies-snowden-deserves-to-die/#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 21:01:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293915And when they say he deserves to die, they don’t mean due process, a treason conviction, and lethal injection. (He hasn’t been charged with treason.) They mean a jab from an umbrella tip laced with Polonium on a busy Moscow street when he’s not looking.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”…

“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”…

“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” [an Army intelligence officer] said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

Two questions. One, via Andy Levy:

Snowden’s argument all along is that he had no choice but to go on the lam abroad. If he’d stayed and tried to follow proper whistleblower procedure, he’d have been punished severely. Intelligence officers fantasizing in print about killing him only proves the point. Pro tip: If your nemesis is busy trying to convince people that the security state has turned sinister, you might want to go light on the “it’d be awesome to shoot him in the face” talking points.

Two: How does a story like this get put together? “Hi, I’m from BuzzFeed. I’m wondering: Have you ever daydreamed about assassinating Edward Snowden?” “Boy, have I! Let me tell you in detail.” What?

Make sure to read the whole BF post, though, not just the excerpt. Near the end, Benny Johnson quotes intel officials who say some of the bad guys have stopped using the telecom platforms exposed by Snowden and even that some of the NSA’s sources in the field have become “useless” since the leaks began. That’s a predictable result from a massive intelligence breach: If your name’s on a list of American informants and suddenly there’s reason to believe that list has gotten loose, you have good reasons to rethink the relationship. Makes me wonder what would happen if Snowden’s maybe-mythical-maybe-not “doomsday” trove of encrypted NSA documents ended up being published online somehow. Supposedly, Snowden’s uploaded the documents to various servers and arranged it so that several confidants would receive a password to decrypt them if something were to happen to him. It’s his insurance policy against exactly the sort of assassination scenario imagined in the BuzzFeed piece. (It also seems, perversely, like an assassination incentive for enemy governments. If China, say, knows that U.S. intelligence will be blamed if Snowden turns up dead and that his death will trigger the leaking of the NSA’s most sensitive secrets, why wouldn’t they take him out?) No one knows what’s in the “doomsday” trove but Jack Goldsmith hears that most of the 1.7 million documents stolen by Snowden relate to U.S. military operations. It may be that he’s prepared to compromise American troops all over the world as revenge if any harm comes to him. Even if harm doesn’t come to him, who knows what foreign intel agencies are capable of now in turns of bleeding-edge decryption technology. Maybe they’ll find the “doomsday” trove and unveil it themselves.

Exit question: Why hasn’t U.S. intel surreptitiously leaked details about other nations’ own dubious surveillance practices? If you want to put Snowden on the defensive without physically harming him while re-focusing outrage abroad at people’s own governments, feeding a few reporters info about what his good friends in Russia and Brazil are up to is one place to start.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/american-spies-snowden-deserves-to-die/feed/129293915NYT: Obama was surprised by the extent of NSA surveillance in Snowden’s leakshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/nyt-obama-was-surprised-by-the-extent-of-nsa-surveillance-in-snowdens-leaks/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/nyt-obama-was-surprised-by-the-extent-of-nsa-surveillance-in-snowdens-leaks/#commentsThu, 16 Jan 2014 19:01:14 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293707What it was, precisely, that surprised him is unclear. The Times mentions tapping Angela Merkel’s phone as one surprise, but how many others were there and at what level of detail? It’s one thing for the president not to know the particulars of individual investigations as they’re happening; it’s another thing for him not to know, say, that PRISM exists. Which is it? Remember, this is a guy with a funny knack for remaining blissfully ignorant of his underlings’ worst screw-ups and excesses. Did he not know what the NSA was up to because they were hiding it from him or because he’d made clear that he didn’t want to know?

At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, just how far the surveillance had gone. “Things seem to have grown at the N.S.A.,” Mr. Plouffe said, citing specifically the tapping of foreign leaders’ telephones. “I think it was disturbing to most people, and I think he found it disturbing.”

Yet it is hard to express indignation at actions of the government after five years of running it, and some involved in surveillance note that it was Mr. Obama who pushed national security agencies to be aggressive in hunting terrorists. “For some, his outrage does ring a little bit hollow,” said a former counterterrorism official….

[A]fter he won the election, surveillance issues were off his agenda; instead, he focused on banning interrogation techniques he deemed torture and trying, futilely, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “There wasn’t really any serious discussion of what N.S.A. was up to,” said a former intelligence official, who like others did not want to be named describing internal conversations.

He also allegedly derided Snowden to his confidants as an, ahem, “self-important narcissist.” I’m intrigued, though, that it was the tapping of Merkel’s phone that apparently set him off, as that’s way down the list of NSA practices that Americans are troubled by. The public will give the White House a break on traditional spycraft abroad, even if it involves something as delicate as listening into a key ally’s conversations. It’s the massive data dragnet at home that’s worrisome. Interesting that O sees it the opposite way, but not surprising: The chilly relations with Merkel lately are more likely to make his job harder than NSA abuses that barely register when Americans are asked what their top priorities on policy.

Take advantage of the slow news day and read the entire NYT piece, as it’s a chronicle of how quickly O’s civil libertarian rhetoric circa 2007 changed once it became his job to protect the country from terrorism. That’s a predictable response from any mainstream politician: If you’re the guy who’ll be blamed the next time hijackers successfully aim a plane at a skyscraper, you’ll think twice before laying down a weapon that might conceivably prevent that. Obama’s metamorphosis on NSA surveillance might not have been as cynical as Hillary copping to opposing the surge in Iraq for electoral reasons, but it’s a potent reminder before 2016 that where you stand depends on where you sit. Even President Rand Paul wouldn’t be immune, although he’s probably less susceptible than anyone else.

The Times piece also shows fairly conclusively that Snowden fans are right when they say that NSA reforms never would have landed on Obama’s agenda if not for the leaks. O likes to blather that domestic surveillance is a “debate we need to have” or whatever, but he clearly had no interest in debating it. The GOP wasn’t hassling him over it, it was a useful counterterror tool at his disposal (if not in terms of actual results than in terms of hard proof that he was doing everything he could to prevent terrorism) — if it ain’t broke, O apparently thought, why fix it? Turns out a lot of people do think it’s broke, even if fixing it isn’t a top priority, and a lot of those people are in his base. That’s why he’s giving a speech tomorrow about NSA reforms; as with his big speech about drones last year, the point is less to propose meaningful reforms than to simply gesture to liberals that he’s capital-c Concerned about this and intends to do something about it. Judging from the tea leaves, most of the changes he’s planning to propose are cosmetic, like letting telecom companies hold users’ data instead of the government but not requiring a warrant for the NSA to access those user databases. The gesture of reform is what’s important here, not the reform itself.

Oh, and per WaPo, after he’s done proposing a few changes himself, he’s going to punt this over to Congress and let them clean it up. That’s perfectly appropriate but highly unusual for a guy who’s spent the past few years arguing that he can do all sorts of things as an executive, including suspending key parts of laws enacted by Congress, without congressional approval. (The whole thrust of the White House’s message this week, in fact, is that O will act where Congress won’t.) The last time he decided to boot a matter over to the legislature that he probably could have dealt with himself was his proposed attack on Syria in August — coincidentally, another policy matter that he’d badly bungled and was suddenly desperate to share blame for. Oh well. Harry Reid’s and John Boehner’s problem now.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/16/nyt-obama-was-surprised-by-the-extent-of-nsa-surveillance-in-snowdens-leaks/feed/71293707Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/05/quotes-of-the-day-1605/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/05/quotes-of-the-day-1605/#commentsMon, 06 Jan 2014 01:01:55 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=292293The whistleblower-versus-traitor argument has taken on a new dimension with recent moves to curtail the programs that Mr. Snowden revealed. A federal judge ruled that one program was probably unconstitutional, technology companies are demanding changes, lawmakers are considering restrictions, and even a White House panel urged modifications.

But inside the White House and the Justice Department, Mr. Ledgett’s suggestion has been met with stony opposition. The administration has made no move to reach out to negotiate any kind of deal and makes clear that it has no plans to. Officials express nothing but antipathy for Mr. Snowden, whose disclosures, one argued, have caused Al Qaeda and its allies “to change their tactics.”…

“The irony is the Obama administration welcomes the debate but condemns the man who sparked the debate,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. “The debate would never have happened but for Edward Snowden.”

***

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community…

The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr. Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.

***

Opponents of amnesty talk about the danger of encouraging more Snowdens. What’s less clear is what they mean by that. This kind of leak, with this scale and historical reach, is rare; whatever deal he might get is unlikely to be offered to anyone who copies a few files. The best way the government can deter the reckless theft of documents is by doing something about overclassification, which has the unintended (but entirely foreseeable) effect of over-clearing people who need to deal with that data for their jobs. Or if, by more Snowdens, we mean people in government who are alarmed enough by extraconstitutional activities to risk their careers and their liberty, do we really need to fear more Snowdens?. The opposite seems likelier.

This brings us to the second case for amnesty: Snowden has done the country good; he has earned his freedom. That is a line of reason that some in the government will have a hard time accepting. But there are a dozen conversations that would not be taking place without his revelations—conversations with consequences, as illustrated by Judge Richard Leon’s finding, earlier this week, that the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of metadata is likely unconstitutional. Nor is it credible to say that Snowden could have done what he did without breaking the law, not when we have also learned that the normal instruments of oversight and judicial review were broken. When Clapper lied to Wyden, that sealed the case for amnesty.

Isn’t that why there is such a thing as amnesty—to square circles like these? Another option may be the related, slightly lesser absolution of a pardon (unlike an amnesty, it generally involves first saying that you were guilty). A pardon is what Jimmy Carter offered to young men who had evaded the draft for the Vietnam War. Their acts, too, were tied to protests against the logic of the war, and may offer a useful parallel when thinking about Snowden’s legal situation.

***

[Sen. Rand] Paul compared Snowden’s law-breaking to the controversial testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who previously testified before Congress that the NSA did not collect data from American citizens intentionally.

“I don’t think we can selectively apply the law. So James Clapper did break the law and there is a prison sentence for that. So did Edward Snowden,” Paul said.

“So I think personally he probably would come home for some penalty of a few years in prison which would be probably not unlike what James Clapper probably deserves for lying to Congress, and that maybe if they served in a prison cell together, we’d become further enlightened as a country over what we should and shouldn’t do,” Paul added…

“I think the only way he’s coming home is if someone would offer him a fair trial with a reasonable sentence, but I don’t think the death penalty,” Paul said of Snowden. “I mean, we’ve had people all over the news, some of the same people who are defending James Clapper lying to Congress are saying ‘off with his head’ or he should be hung from the nearest tree. I don’t think that’s appropriate and I think really in the end, history is going to judge that he revealed great abuses of our government and great abuses of our intelligence community.”

***

My scale weighs against Snowden. He launched an important, overdue debate and reassessment of collection practices. Perhaps that would not have happened otherwise. The intelligence community is reaping the bitter rewards of its combined aversion to transparency and its addiction to employing available technology to maximum potential.

Yet the existing oversight, while flawed, is not as feckless as Snowden portrays it, and the degree of intrusion on Americans’ privacy, while troubling, is not nearly as menacing as he sees it. In the government’s massive database is information about who I called and who they called in turn. Perhaps the government shouldn’t have it; surely, there should be more controls over when they can search it. But my metadata almost certainly hasn’t been scrutinized; even if it has, the content of the calls remains off-limits.

If the scope of Snowden’s theft and subsequent disclosures had been as limited, my scale might balance in the opposite direction. But the theft was massive. The injury to intelligence-gathering is of equal magnitude. “I am still working for the NSA right now,” Snowden announced. “They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

Orwell might have called that double-think.

***

If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.

But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong…

Whistleblowers have large egos by nature, and there is no crime or shame in that. But one gasps at the megalomania and delusion in Snowden’s statements, and one can’t help but wonder if he is a dupe, a tool, or simply astonishingly naïve.

Along these same lines, it may be telling that Snowden did not release—or at least the recipients of his cache haven’t yet published—any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China, even though he would have had access to the NSA’s after-action reports on the hundreds or thousands of hacking campaigns that they too have mounted over the years.

***

[T]he latest installment from the “Snowden files” (as the Post’s subhead put it Friday) made me wonder if what we’re experiencing and reading right now is still journalism, investigative or otherwise, or whether it is becoming something very different. I wonder if, after all the disclosures that have already touched off a major reassessment of National Security Agency surveillance by the U.S. government, what we’re reading now is more like free advertising for a certain point of view — Edward Snowden’s point of view, that is, as well as that of his comrade-in-outrage, Glenn Greenwald…

[D]espite very justifiable doubts about the efficacy of the NSA’s bulk collection of telephony metadata, and very reasonable concerns that more protections should be built in against the possibility of a future J. Edgar Hoover — an abuser of liberty and privacy, in other words — intelligence experts have said most of the agency’s key programs, such as surveillance of emails abroad, have already proven critical to national security. As panel member Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, told me last month, even the telephony program might have helped to avert 9/11. He also said he is in favor of restarting a program the NSA discontinued in 2011 that involved the collection of “metadata” for Internet communications. Both programs together, he added, have “the ability to stop the next 9/11.”

So the question is, what purpose does this endless and seemingly indiscriminate exposure of American national-security secrets serve? This is most definitely not the Pentagon Papers, when the Post and the New York Times exposed the truth about a war already largely gone by. This is, if not quite a war, then at least a genuine present danger to Americans — a threat that is, according to some officials, only growing more dangerous.

***

Snowden has argued that he had a moral duty to challenge an intelligence machinery that was out of control. Hudson Institute senior fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law,” is not impressed. Snowden outed U.S. intelligence “for engaging in activity that almost every state engages in.” The former contractor then went into hiding in China and Russia, where he enjoys temporary asylum. “I think it is disgraceful,” quoth Schoenfeld, that Snowden lectures Washington but “doesn’t have the courage to criticize abuses of free speech in his host country.”…

It’s almost funny when you follow the editorial boards’ logic. The papers argued that Snowden is a hero because he leaked material about which the public has a right to know. Then they supported granting amnesty or leniency if Snowden would agree to hand over any remaining documents rather than share them with the world. A trial would give Snowden the opportunity to tell his story, the American public a chance to find out what exactly Snowden leaked and Washington the burden of proving a criminal case — but the Times and The Guardian apparently prefer a backroom deal.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/05/quotes-of-the-day-1605/feed/225292293Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/17/quotes-of-the-day-1588/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/17/quotes-of-the-day-1588/#commentsWed, 18 Dec 2013 03:31:17 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=290868Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has offered to collaborate with a Brazilian investigation into the NSA surveillance program he revealed earlier this year, according to a letter published in a local newspaper on Tuesday.

In “An Open Letter to the Brazilian People,” published by newspaper Folha De S. Paulo, Snowden said he would like to assist in a congressional probe into the NSA’s spying program, which monitored the personal communications of President Dilma Rousseff and other Brazilians.

“I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so,” the letter said…

“Until a country grants permanent political asylum, the U.S. government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak,” Snowden said.

***

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden stole vastly more information than previously speculated, and is holding it at ransom for his own protection.

“What’s floating is so dangerous, we’d be behind for twenty years in terms of access (if it were to be leaked),” a ranking Department of Defense official told the Daily Caller.

[T]hough Wyden’s colleagues don’t yet have the numbers to pass an NSA crackdown bill in the Senate, his coalition is growing.

It includes Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) as well as Democrats like Heinrich, who joined the Intelligence Committee this year and promptly sided against Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) on the issue of digital government surveillance.

“The judge got it right. I think that we have strayed from what the framers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment and were dealing directly with government overreach,” Heinrich said in an interview.

***

Reflecting on the dramatic changes that have taken place since the first newspaper stories based on Snowden’s leaked materials began appearing back in June, one U.S. official noted that the NSA’s once-solid support inside the White House and on Capitol Hill has waned since the panel was created in August, and that the once cordial relationship between the White House and NSA has become distinctly “chilly” over the past two months.

NSA officials became concerned this fall when their memos were increasingly ignored and their phone calls to key officials in Washington, especially at the State Department, were not returned. And more ominously, rumors began to reach NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, that the review panel had been given new marching orders to be robust and searching in its report.

“We got the distinct impression that we were now lepers in Washington,” a senior NSA official recalled, adding, “Putting as much distance as possible between the White House and us was the order of the day.”

***

The NSA’s biggest strategic communications problem, however, is that they’ve been so walled off from the American body politic that they have no idea when they’re saying things that sound tone-deaf. Like expats returning from a long overseas tour, NSA staffers don’t quite comprehend how much perceptions of the agency have changed. The NSA stresses in its mission statement and corporate culture that it “protects privacy rights.” Indeed, there were faded banners proclaiming that goal in our briefing room. Of course, NSAers see this as protecting Americans from foreign cyber-intrusions. In a post-Snowden era, however, it’s impossible to read that statement without suppressing a laugh.

It might be an occupational hazard, but NSA officials continue to talk about the threat environment as if they’ve been frozen in amber since 2002. To them, the world looks increasingly unsafe. Syria is the next Pakistan, China is augmenting its capabilities to launch a financial war on the United States, and the next terrorist attack on American soil is right around the corner. They could very well be correct — except that the American public has become inured to such warnings over the past decade, and their response has been to tell politicians to focus on things at home and leave the rest of the world alone. A strategy of “trust us, the world is an unsafe place” won’t resonate now the way it did in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The NSA’s attitude toward the press is, well, disturbing. There were repeated complaints about the ways in which recent reportage of the NSA was warped or lacking context. To be fair, this kind of griping is a staple of officials across the entire federal government. Some of the NSA folks went further, however. One official accused some media outlets of “intentionally misleading the American people,” which is a pretty serious accusation. This official also hoped that the Obama administration would crack down on these reporters, saying, “I have some reforms for the First Amendment.” I honestly do not know whether that last statement was a joke or not. Either way, it’s not funny.

***

Voters aren’t enthusiastic about granting NSA leaker Edward Snowden amnesty to halt his release of U.S. intelligence secrets, even though most agree the continued disclosures are hurting national security.

Sixty-two percent (62%) still think it’s at least somewhat likely that the continuing disclosure of National Security Agency phone and e-mail surveillance programs is hurting U.S. national security.

***

The letter affirms for me, for whatever it’s worth, my own sense that Snowden and his actions are probably not well captured by either the “hero” or “traitor” archetypes. Those archetypes, after all, almost never satisfactorily explain the actions of actual human beings, who tend to be just too complicated. And Snowden certainly seems to be that. Some of his actions, like the initial decision to release the leaks despite facing a life in exile, certainly appear motivated by an earnest desire to make the world a better place, or at least better conform to certain ideals of liberty as he sees them. Other actions, though, have been much tougher to explain without allowing for the real possibility that he may have other motivations as well.

Snowden’s quid-pro-quo offer to Brazil seems to serve his ideals and his self-interest so interchangeably that we just can’t answer which is primarily driving him, nor we can fully dismiss either. The young leaker and his headline-grabbing actions continue to be, in many ways, mirrors for our own American process of thinking through the larger issues he’s helped to raise.

“Only the Supreme Court can resolve the question on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program. I welcome a Supreme Court review since it has been more than 30 years since the court’s original decision of constitutionality, and I believe it is crucial to settling the issue once and for all. In the meantime, the call records program remains in effect,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Those of us who support the call records program do so with a sincere belief that it, along with other programs, is constitutional and helps keep the country safe from attack. I believe the program can benefit from additional transparency and privacy protections.”///

Majority Leader Harry Reid said it was necessary to have a “good public debate” on the NSA programs but that other judges had disagreed with Leon’s ruling.

“We know that senators, both Democrats and Republicans, would like to change the law as it relates to some of the collection activities and I think that’s good,” he said.

My act of conscience began with a statement: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. That’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

If Brazil hears only one thing from me, let it be this: when all of us band together against injustices and in defense of privacy and basic human rights, we can defend ourselves from even the most powerful systems.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/17/quotes-of-the-day-1588/feed/262290868Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/quotes-of-the-day-1587/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/quotes-of-the-day-1587/#commentsTue, 17 Dec 2013 03:31:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=290714National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States, in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency…

The NSA official in charge of assessing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s leaks, Richard Ledgett, told CBS News an amnesty still remains controversial within the agency, which has spent the past six months defending itself against a global outcry and legislative and executive proposals to restrain its broad surveillance activities.

“My personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Ledgett, who is under consideration to become the agency’s top civilian, said in an interview slated to air Sunday evening on 60 Minutes. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

“Mr. Snowden is accused of leaking classified information and faces felony charges here in the United States,” said Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson for the National Security Council. “He should be returned to the U.S. as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process and protections.”

Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time…

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

***

Amnesty? Have they lost their minds? Snowden is a traitor to his country, who is responsible for the most damaging theft and release of classified information in American history. His actions have exposed not only the NSA terrorist surveillance programs, but our intelligence collection efforts against foreign governments, including Russia and China. He has aided our enemies, shared intelligence with potential adversaries, and has damaged our ability to defend against future terrorist attacks. Maybe we offer him life in prison instead of a firing squad, but amnesty? That would be insanity…

If Edward Snowden can get amnesty after what he has done, then who could ever be prosecuted for any intelligence leak? How could we possibly pursue charges against leakers for individual disclosures, however damaging, when someone like Snowden is allowed to get away with the largest disclosure of critical intelligence in our history?

“That kid was a genius among geniuses,” says the NSA staffer. “NSA is full of smart people, but anybody who sat in a meeting with Ed will tell you he was in a class of his own…I’ve never seen anything like it.”…

Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint. Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end for one of its projects, despite his contractor status. As his coworker tells it, he was given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. “Big mistake in hindsight,” says Snowden’s former colleague. “But if you had a guy who could do things nobody else could, and the only problem was that his badge was green instead of blue, what would you do?”…

Snowden’s superiors were so impressed with his skills that he was at one point offered a position on the elite team of NSA hackers known as Tailored Access Operations. He unexpectedly turned it down and instead joined Booz Allen to work at NSA’s Threat Operation Center…

Snowden’s former colleague says that he or she has slowly come to understand Snowden’s decision to leak the NSA’s files. “I was shocked and betrayed when I first learned the news, but as more time passes I’m inclined to believe he really is trying to do the right thing and it’s not out of character for him. I don’t agree with his methods, but I understand why he did it,” he or she says. “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”

***

Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents, welcomed a court ruling on Monday that declared the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records to be a likely violation of the US constitution.

Snowden said the ruling, by a US district judge, justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts,” he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received the documents from Snowden.

“Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many,” said Snowden, whose statement was first reported by the New York Times.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/quotes-of-the-day-1587/feed/285290714Federal judge finds NSA phone metadata collection probably violates the Fourth Amendmenthttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/federal-judge-halts-nsa-phones-metadata-collection-finds-it-probably-violates-the-fourth-amendment/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/federal-judge-halts-nsa-phones-metadata-collection-finds-it-probably-violates-the-fourth-amendment/#commentsMon, 16 Dec 2013 20:44:20 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=290667The headline says “probably” because the ruling was on a preliminary injunction. He’ll issue a ruling on a permanent injunction after this order is inevitably appealed and he hears further arguments from both sides, assuming this issue doesn’t land before the Supreme Court first. A weird fact about the judge in this case: He was nominated to the bench by Dubya on … September 10, 2001. If you support the NSA metadata program, there’s the peg for the obligatory “September 10th mentality” talking point.

Here’s the opinion, which is worth skimming even if you’re not trained in law. Leon writes more accessibly than most judges, especially in the key section. Three issues in a case like this. One: Doesn’t the law say that only the FISA Court can hear a challenge to the NSA surveillance program? Leon’s a district court judge, not a FISA judge. How can he have jurisdiction? Two: Didn’t the Supreme Court rule once before, in the late 70s, that there’s no privacy interest in phone metadata? If that’s the case, how can there be a Fourth Amendment issue here? And three: Even if there’s a Fourth Amendment issue, why doesn’t mass metadata collection qualify as a “reasonable” search and seizure? It’s crucial to catching terrorists before they strike. Isn’t it?

On point one, Leon says it’s true — he has no jurisdiction to hear statutory challenges to a DOJ collection order. If you’re claiming that the DOJ exceeded the authority granted to it by Congress in issuing an order, that’s for the FISA Court to decide. Not only that, but American citizens don’t have standing to sue in the FISA Court. Only the recipient of a collection order, like Google or Verizon, can do that. In fact, because it’s illegal for the recipient to reveal the existence of a collection order, American citizens aren’t even supposed to know when a collection order is issued, let alone be able to sue the government. So no, there’s no jurisdiction for a federal district court to hear challenges to an order — on statutory grounds. But what if the challenge is on constitutional grounds, i.e. that an order violates the Fourth Amendment? District courts can hear those challenges, says Leon, because potential constitutional violations are of the utmost importance and Congress never went out of its way to say that that type of challenge should be heard only in the FISA Court too. Fourth Amendment questions are fair game for any lower-level federal court.

Fair enough. But what about point two, that the Supreme Court’s 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland established a precedent that metadata can be collected under the Fourth Amendment? Leon’s answer is the guts of the opinion; I suggest skipping to page 43 and reading it yourself. He gives four reasons why Smith shouldn’t control decisions on NSA surveillance. First, Smith dealt with a case where the cops wanted a particular defendant’s phone records for use at trial, not everyone’s phone records to store for years into the future. Second, Smith involved a discrete case, not a formal policy established by the federal government and telecom companies for continuous data-harvesting. Third, technology has advanced so wildly in this area since Smith was decided that it’s foolish to use it as controlling precedent. Mass data harvesting was science fiction in 1979 when “pen registers” were the hot legal topic of the day. Clearly, given concerns about scale and invasiveness, courts should consider the issue anew. And fourth, metadata can tell techies much more now than it could 34 years ago. You’re simply dealing with a more significant privacy interest today than you were in Smith. Result: Yes, this program implicates the Fourth Amendment.

The last chance for NSA defenders is to argue that, all of that aside, the searches are “reasonable” because they’re a speedy way for the feds to sniff out and interrupt terrorist attacks. Just one problem with that, says Leon: The feds have produced no evidence of it. He asked them to show him how the metadata program is helping to catch the bad guys where all other methods have failed and, so far at least, they can’t do it. That’s what triggers the preliminary injunction (which is momentarily stayed while the order is appealed). If the DOJ could show gangbusters results in stopping terrorism from the metadata program, that compelling state interest would affect the balance of equities in granting the injunction. As it is, because they’re offering nothing, Leon treats it as an easy call.

I’ll highlight one passage for you since you’re likely to hear Snowden fans mention it anyway:

In other words, if not for Snowden’s leaks, this case literally might not have happened. Per the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Clapper case earlier this year, you can’t get standing before a federal judge by merely speculating that the NSA is targeting you. You need to show a real likelihood of concrete injury. Right, says Leon — and now, thanks to Snowden’s exposure of PRISM, we’ve got that. The leaker has changed the legal facts on the ground, enough so to make a Fourth Amendment lawsuit possible. That may be the single most tangible change in U.S. surveillance policy to have come from Snowden’s leaking, despite Obama’s endless promises about reform.

If nothing else, let’s hope this is harbinger of federal courts being more generous in stretching standing law to accommodate constitutional suits by private citizens. Separation of powers is fertile ground for that, as you already know.

Update: I tweaked the headline, which originally said the judge had halted metadata collection, because the order is stayed while the appeal plays out. If the feds lose the appeal — which may or may not reach the Supreme Court — then the program will be halted.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/16/federal-judge-halts-nsa-phones-metadata-collection-finds-it-probably-violates-the-fourth-amendment/feed/40290667Chris Matthews: Don’t worry, I’ll include some easier questions when I interview Obamahttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/05/chris-matthews-dont-worry-ill-include-some-easier-questions-when-i-interview-obama/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/05/chris-matthews-dont-worry-ill-include-some-easier-questions-when-i-interview-obama/#commentsThu, 05 Dec 2013 21:21:29 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=289482Via the Washington Free Beacon, can we trust a guy who compared himself yesterday to a kid on Christmas Eve to ask tough, newsy questions of the president? The whole point of agreeing to a town hall carried by a liberal cable network, with an audience full of college kids, hosted by someone who cops to getting thrills up his leg at Obama’s oratory, is to let O pitch ObamaCare in the most favorable of media environments. He’s playing tee-ball here, by design. They might as well invite him to wear pajamas. Even the “hard” questions are more likely to be along the lines of “Were you disappointed on launch day that your team had failed you?” than “HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE KNOWN?” The fact that Matthews has actually allotted time for questions even he thinks will be easy — as well as a “fun” segment at the end — makes me want to watch in morbid curiosity to see how bad it can get. Will there be any tingles mid-program? What would that look like? Is America, as a society, prepared for it?

As for the audience, I’m betting that the disaffected millennials who want to recall Obama will be grossly underrepresented. One interesting tangent on that, though: How come young adults aged 25-29 are still more or less on O’s side whereas younger adults aged 18-24 have soured on him? Emma Roller has a theory:

Intuitively, you’d think younger millennials would be more supportive of Obama because his health law allows them to stay on their parents’ plan longer for free. Why is it the opposite? My working theory: older millennials are more supportive of the president is because they were around to vote for him in 2008, and so have a more visceral tie to his policies.

I asked IOP pollster-in-chief John Della Volpe if he thought my theory was plausible. He responded, “Not only is that plausible but I agree!” So it may not be so much that the 18-24 set likes Obama less; they just don’t risk their egos as much by not supporting him.

No doubt. Older millennials made the purchase psychologically on Hopenchange; it’d have to fall apart completely before they admit it’s a lemon. Younger millennials aren’t similarly invested. There may be another element, though. Some studies suggest that once a person’s political identity is formed in youth, it remains surprisingly steady for the rest of his or her life. Older millennials aren’t just kids who got suckered by Obama hype, they’re voters who, like most of the rest of America, soured on Bush and the GOP because of Dubya’s second term. Unlike most of the rest of America, though, that pro-Democrat/anti-Republican orientation is more apt to endure in their age group because it developed during a formative age for political awareness. They’re sticking with Obama not just for ego-protection, in other words, but because of bona fide partisan identification. Younger millennials are in a different position, having largely missed the Bush years and picked up politics in the Obama years of economic stagnation. They’re not firmly forged Democrats, unlike their slightly older brothers and sisters. That’s good news for the GOP, even if older millennials are now mostly a lost cause.

Anyway, set your DVRs. Exit question: What would constitute a “hard question” for Obama? Matthews seems to think asking him about NSA surveillance qualifies, which is understandable but … not really true, I think. You know what Obama’s going to say — it’s a delicate balance between freedom and security, no one’s more concerned about privacy than he is, he’s convinced that these programs save lives, etc etc. It’s not a hard question if you can guess the answer in advance. But then, that also goes for my hobbyhorse lately about O violating separation of powers. That’s not a hard subject to spin either: The executive branch has some discretion in how it enforces the law and he’s exercising that discretion in ObamaCare’s transitional period to make the program better for Americans. The art of the hard question is in the follow-up, not the initial ask. We’ll see how Tingles does tonight.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/05/chris-matthews-dont-worry-ill-include-some-easier-questions-when-i-interview-obama/feed/98289482New Snowden bombshell: NSA secretly tapping Google’s, Yahoo’s data pipelines to harvest metadata — and contenthttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/30/new-snowden-bombshell-nsa-secretly-tapping-googles-yahoos-data-pipelines-to-harvest-metadata-and-content/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/30/new-snowden-bombshell-nsa-secretly-tapping-googles-yahoos-data-pipelines-to-harvest-metadata-and-content/#commentsWed, 30 Oct 2013 21:21:12 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=285107And of course, some of that metadata and content was generated by Americans. How can the NSA get away with that? In theory, because of geography. Some of Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers and the fiber-optic pipelines that connect them are located outside the United States, and the rules on foreign surveillance are less strict than Fourth Amendment/FISA limitations on domestic surveillance. Is it okay for the U.S. government to hack an American company as long as the hacking occurs outside the borders of the United States? Does that magically transform domestic surveillance into “foreign”?

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants…

In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” … a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data resides. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!” The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security.

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said…

The Google and Yahoo operations call attention to an asymmetry in U.S. surveillance law: While Congress has lifted some restrictions on NSA domestic surveillance on the grounds that purely foreign communications sometimes pass over U.S. switches and cables, it has not added restrictions overseas, where American communications or data stores now cross over foreign switches.

One of the briefing documents on MUSCULAR swiped by Snowden asserts that it’s “produced important intelligence leads against hostile foreign governments.” Interestingly, rather than make that argument, NSA chief Keith Alexander flatly denied that the NSA is engaged in any pipeline-tapping when asked for comment on the new WaPo story this afternoon. (He’s denied Snowden’s allegations before, though, notes NBC, only to have them proved true later.) If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a reason. The NSA also tapped fiber-optic data pipelines located inside the U.S. a few years ago and got a rare rebuke from the FISA Court for it. I mentioned it in this post. Siphoning off data “upstream” here at home ended up pushing too many communications by American citizens into the NSA’s net, which the Court declared was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. WaPo notes in its new story on MUSCULAR that it’s “not clear” how much data is collected from American clients of Google/Yahoo by the NSA, and there is, apparently, some attempt to minimize the amount via search filters. But given the sheer volume of what’s being sucked up, that can only do so much.

What’s novel about this new scoop is that it’s less about the NSA potentially violating the privacy of individual Americans than it is about the feds engaging in cyberespionage against American companies — and not just any companies, but companies that have been cooperative in sharing user data with the NSA under programs like PRISM. It confirms the impression of an agency whose appetite for information is so voracious that it’ll happily cannibalize its partners just to get a little extra, even if they’re U.S. entities. If they’re reduced to arguing that it’s technically legal because they “only” hacked the parts of Google’s and Yahoo’s systems that are located in Europe, not the ones located here, that’ll hurt them even more, I think. That distinction seems far too formalistic to rebut the basic objection that Uncle Sam shouldn’t be in the practice of quietly stealing mountains of intellectual property from American businesses.

The irony is, per the last paragraph of the excerpt above, this might further tie the NSA’s hands abroad, where nearly everyone agrees they should have a freer hand to operate because it’s easier to target foreigners exclusively there. They’re already back on their heels because of the uproar over them tapping Merkel’s phone; now, if there’s a new uproar over this, Congress may feel pressured to impose new restrictions on how the agency operates internationally to limit its ability to target U.S. citizens or corporations overseas. What a backfire, if it happens. Exit question: Why did they feel the need to tap Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers if they were already being handed information by the companies under PRISM? WaPo tries to explain but I’m not seeing it.

Today’s news has nothing to do with Snowden’s alleged goal of awakening Americans to violations of their civil liberties by the U.S. government, but that’s par for the course. One of the early scoops to come from his cache this summer was the fact that the NSA had bugged Medvedev’s communications at the G20 back in 2009. That was the first clue after the initial uproar over PRISM that, for all his rhetoric, this wasn’t just about protecting his countrymen’s privacy. I wonder if that’s even what it’s mainly about. The revelations about domestic data-mining have been less of a headache for the White House on balance than the fallout internationally over NSA spying on allies like Angela Merkel, but Snowden couldn’t get away with the latter if he wasn’t also responsible for the former. His image as a whistleblower is built on the domestic stuff, which in turn generates political capital he can spend on the foreign stuff. That’s why, I think, instead of rushing out all the big scoops about what the NSA is doing to Americans, his media contacts dribble them out piecemeal and sporadically. They’re friendly reminders, amid the attempts to damage U.S. diplomatic relations with European and South American nations, that Snowden’s supposedly On Your Side.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its “customer” departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their “Rolodexes” so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems…

“In one recent case,” the [2006] memo notes, “a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders … Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked.”…

But the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced “little reportable intelligence”. In the wake of the Merkel row, the US is facing growing international criticism that any intelligence benefit from spying on friendly governments is far outweighed by the potential diplomatic damage.

Given how the NSA’s technological capabilities have grown over time, I’d be surprised if they’re not monitoring the calls of every world leader on Earth by now. Which would be a terrible thing, because … why? Lefty Peter Beinart has a nifty bit of concern-trolling at the Daily Beat about how dastardly right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh would be outraged at Germany if they got caught tapping the White House’s phones whereas they’re completely sanguine about the fact that we’re tapping Merkel’s. Even if that were true, which it’s not, so what? Go figure that Americans want an informational advantage for America over everyone else, allies included. But as I say, it’s not true. If the White House left itself that vulnerable, most public outrage here at home would be aimed at the NSA and CIA for failing so badly at counterespionage, not at the Germans for engaging in it. China’s hard at work each day hacking or trying to hack every computer in America, but no one on either side is pounding the table to bomb Beijing over it. They’re spying; that’s what spies do. I hope/trust that the NSA’s mining everything China has in return, in real time if possible. Arguably the calculus is different when friendly nations spy on each other since the alliance depends to some degree on trust, and aggressive spying might jeopardize that trust. Even there, though, says Marc Ambinder, why be surprised that an intelligence agency would risk it? Gathering information is their job, and the more exclusive that information is, the more theoretically valuable it’ll likely be.

The NSA also collects strategic intelligence. It must, because the United States does not have the freedom to act without consequences, and without, in many cases, the aid and acquiescence of allies. Make no mistake: For the NSA, giving the U.S. president valuable information to the exclusion of every other country and leader in the world is not a morally ambiguous goal. It’s the goal. It’s not controversial.

In order to map out out the geopolitical space within which the president will act, he needs to have solid intelligence, a good guesstimate, on what other countries are going to do and how they will respond to whatever he decides to do. The president wages war, conducts diplomacy negotiates economic treaties, imposes sanctions, and works to promote U.S. interests abroad. Strategic intelligence should inform all of these decisions, not simply those that involve the military.

It’s one thing to say that the United States’ actions don’t always match up with the values we espouse, and that’s true. When our hypocrisy is exposed, our moral authority wanes and our ability to maneuver is reduced.

It’s quite another to assume that other countries are any purer. They never have been and probably won’t be.

It’s “icky” that we use the same methods to spy on friends like Merkel as we do enemies, says Ambinder, but whether ickiness ever would or ever should deter an intelligence bureau from maximizing its informational advantage is a separate matter. If anything, the White House and the NSA are in the same position here as they are in handling counterterrorism, where political incentives force the feds to err on the side of aggressiveness lest they be seen in the aftermath of a major intelligence failure as not having done everything they could to prevent it. To me, the most revealing bit from today’s Guardian report is how little value the NSA apparently found in listening in on foreign leaders’ calls; that makes me wonder whether, as standard counterespionage practice, those leaders have been guarding what they say because they already suspect there might be eavesdroppers in the digital age, whether from China, Russia, the U.S., the UK or somewhere else. No one knows for sure except Merkel and her advisors, but everyone knows for sure that revealing the fact of this eavesdropping puts her in a position where she needs to express outrage towards the U.S., whether it’s sincere or not. That means damage to U.S./German relations and that has all sorts of bad consequences potentially. What’s the gain to Americans’ civil liberties from it?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/24/new-snowden-revelation-nsa-monitored-calls-of-35-world-leaders-in-2006/feed/40284375Video: NSA confronted by most formidable opponent yet — celebritieshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/24/video-nsa-confronted-by-most-formidable-opponent-yet-celebrities/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/24/video-nsa-confronted-by-most-formidable-opponent-yet-celebrities/#commentsThu, 24 Oct 2013 21:21:24 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=284341I had the same reaction to this as Christian Toto of Breitbart: The most striking thing about it is how relatively low-wattage the star power is. Under President Romney, there’d be multiple A-listers in the shuffle — Brad, Matt, Sean, Scarlett, Tom, maybe the other Tom. As it is, the best they can do are lesser lights like Donahue, John Cusack, and good ol’ Oliver Stone, all of whom are sufficiently far left (and have comparatively less to lose) that they’re comfortable attacking a Democratic administration’s policies in a way the Hollywood fundraiser circuit simply isn’t. Which is not to say they’re entirely comfortable. As Toto notes, Obama himself isn’t mentioned in the clip; the villainous Big Brother figure shown is Richard Nixon. Maybe they’re just playing off the Ellsberg cameo in doing that, but it’s more likely the producers decided they’d get further in building resistance to the NSA among young liberals online if they decoupled the movement from criticism of Bambi. If you believe the polls, that’s a smart choice.

Speaking of which, here’s the agency-by-agency breakdown in Pew’s recent poll showing trust in government near a record low. Note the NSA relative to the rest. Hmmm:

I’m not sure what lesson to draw from that. On the one hand, the NSA is viewed less favorably than every other arm of the government except the perennial punching bags of the IRS and the Department of Education. On the other hand, no agency’s taken more of a beating in the news over the past two months than the NSA has. Every week brings something new from Snowden generating global headlines about the mammoth scale of their spying on American allies and Americans themselves — and yet the agency’s still seen favorably by 54 percent of the public versus just 35 percent who see it unfavorably. Eventually the Snowden revelations will dry up and its popularity will start to climb again; if there’s a big counterterror success with which the agency is credited, it’ll rebound even faster. Point being, if you can’t turn the public against massive NSA surveillance after a hurricane of damning news, how likely is it that they’ll ever be turned? Decades later, we’ve still got the IRS and DOE, don’t we?

Exit question: If you’re trying to convince mainstream voters that opposing NSA policies is a perfectly sensible, mainstream thing to do, why would you put Oliver Stone in your PSA?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/24/video-nsa-confronted-by-most-formidable-opponent-yet-celebrities/feed/39284341U.S. intel: Official’s leak to media about Al Qaeda’s terror plot may have hurt us more than Snowden’s leakshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/30/u-s-intel-officials-leak-to-media-about-al-qaedas-terror-plot-may-have-hurt-us-more-than-snowdens-leaks/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/30/u-s-intel-officials-leak-to-media-about-al-qaedas-terror-plot-may-have-hurt-us-more-than-snowdens-leaks/#commentsMon, 30 Sep 2013 15:21:49 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=280888To refresh your memory, the terror threat that forced the closing of 19 U.S. diplomatic outposts abroad in early August was treated as unusually dire by U.S. counterterrorism because of the people involved in the communications about it. They couldn’t reveal who those people were, though, for fear that the targets would then realize they were being bugged and clam up. But then, on August 4, somebody blabbed to McClatchy:

An official who’d been briefed on the matter in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, told McClatchy that the embassy closings and travel advisory were the result of an intercepted communication between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri in which Zawahiri gave “clear orders” to al-Wuhaysi, who was recently named al Qaida’s general manager, to carry out an attack.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs…

“It was something that was immediate, direct and involved specific people on specific communications about specific events,” one senior American official said of the exchange between the Qaeda leaders. “The Snowden stuff is layered and layered, and it will take a lot of time to understand it. There wasn’t a sudden drop-off from it. A lot of these guys think that they are not impacted by it, and it is difficult stuff for them to understand.”

Other senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials offer a dissenting view, saying that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the impact of the messages between the Qaeda leaders from Mr. Snowden’s overall disclosures, and that the decline is more likely a combination of the two.

That makes me think that my hunch in this post was correct. Weeks after the first leak, U.S. officials started whispering to reporters that they hadn’t intercepted the Zawahiri chat live while it happened but had rather gotten a recording of it off of a storage device held by a captured jihadi courier. That seemed like damage control — a way to reassure Zawahiri and his deputies that we couldn’t listen in real time and therefore it was safe for them to start talking again. No dice. But a nice try.

The Times’s intel sources claim that jihadi chatter doesn’t so much tail off after new Snowden revelations in the press as become temporarily consumed by chitchat about the revelations themselves. Which makes sense: Most of it so far has had to do with the NSA hoovering up communications in the U.S. and allied nations. Whether Snowden’s waging war on the surveillance state in particular or American espionage more broadly, revealing sensitive info about countermeasures against AQ and similar groups would be catastrophic for his cause. All he’s really telling AQ in his leaks is that the feds can access virtually any Internet platform — which AQ seems to have already assumed, given the effort described at the end of the NYT piece that they’ve given to building their own encryption. Of course, the NSA can bust lots of encryption too; my sense from the NYT piece, in fact, is that AQ probably used their “Mujahedeen Secrets” encryption for Zawahiri’s chat about the terror plot not knowing that U.S. intel has (probably) cracked it. Well, now they know. No more chatter.

You would think Obama and the DOJ would want to make a big show of prosecuting this leak, just to prove that they care more about people revealing their spycraft against Al Qaeda than against American citizens. If James Rosen’s e-mails were worth reading, surely McClatchy’s are too, right? I think there’s a simple explanation, though: The official who blabbed to McC wasn’t an American but a Yemeni. McClatchy didn’t identify his nationality in the original leak, but they seemed to the next day in a follow-up story. Frankly, given how Yemen’s likely to handle internal leaks, that guy probably wishes he was in an American jail now.

As to who might be trying to accomplish what with this latest story, who can tell? Is this meant to be false reassurance to Al Qaeda, a valentine to Snowden and his press enablers, or something else entirely (like, a news story…)? I would say that based purely on the timing the August 2013 details were Administration self-promotion like the Obama 2012 re-election leaks.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/30/u-s-intel-officials-leak-to-media-about-al-qaedas-terror-plot-may-have-hurt-us-more-than-snowdens-leaks/feed/25280888New Snowden revelation: In case you hadn’t already guessed, the NSA can crack most of your encrypted data toohttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/05/new-snowden-revelation-in-case-you-hadnt-already-guessed-the-nsa-can-crack-most-of-your-encrypted-data-too/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/05/new-snowden-revelation-in-case-you-hadnt-already-guessed-the-nsa-can-crack-most-of-your-encrypted-data-too/#commentsThu, 05 Sep 2013 22:41:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=277739Can something qualify as bombshell news if everyone already assumed it was true without quite knowing for a fact that it is? By that standard, it’ll be a page one splash if/when Israel finally confirms that it has nuclear weapons. Ahem:

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption: http://t.co/LvoMg0RJI5 || I knew this was happening back when I was a senior network engineer in '05.

They can read basically everything, and you should have guessed that already from the gist of the previous 20-30 Snowden revelations. There are still a few codes they can’t break, apparently — Snowden must know some tricks to keep his own communications encrypted — but if, like most people, the extent of your anti-surveillance measures involves clearing cookies sporadically, rest assured that they won’t have trouble reading your “encrypted” e-mail if they want to.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world…

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware…

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”…

[T]he agencies’ goal [in 2010] was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

The NYT doesn’t explicitly say that the NSA achieved its goal in that boldface bit but the whole thrust of the article is that their decrypting capabilities are, predictably, getting better over time. As with any story in this vein, you come away simultaneously alarmed and awestruck by what they can do and what they’re willing to do in the name of Total Information Awareness. I can’t do justice to it by quoting excerpts, in fact; you should take advantage of the Syria news lull and read it all, noting especially the part about how “back doors” created by the NSA into encryption programs might not remain exclusively the province of the NSA. In fact, I think the real news value of this one isn’t that the NSA is obsessed with cracking codes, which is essentially its job description, but the extent to which Congress has empowered it to intimidate tech companies and their employees into playing ball or else. “[I]n some cases,” the Times notes drily, “the collaboration was clearly coerced. Executives who refuse to comply with secret court orders can face fines or jail time.” That’s what made Lavabit’s decision to shut down so noteworthy. The next OS you install is quite likely to have NSA-built bugs inserted into it, which the manufacturer has no choice but to include in the package if it wants to stay on the feds’ good side. If Congress wants to revisit this subject, that’s a nice place to start.

One footnote: Both the Times and ProPublica stress that U.S. intel was very, very unhappy to hear that this story would be published, for fear that the bad guys would change their encryption methods to avoid NSA spying. Hard to believe after the past two months of NSA stories, though, that foreign governments and jihadis haven’t already figured out that routine digital communications are extremely vulnerable. Remember, Al Qaeda reportedly has tried to create its own proprietary encryption to keep their communications away from prying American eyes. Foreign states doubtless have more sophisticated measures, and the NSA probably has even more sophisticated ways of getting around them. There are no specifics about any of that in the NYT story, just the usual roll call of Google, Microsoft, Skype, etc, that you already assumed the NSA was fiddling with. The threat of meaningful enemy countermeasures seems low, at least to a layman.

The U.S. government has used the merger-approval process to increase its influence over the telecom industry, bringing more companies under its oversight and gaining a say over activities as fundamental as equipment purchases.

The leverage has come from a series of increasingly restrictive security agreements between telecom companies and national-security agencies that are designed to head off threats to strategically significant networks and maintain the government’s ability to monitor communications, according to a review of the public documents and lawyers who have negotiated the agreements.

I think it is safe to say we’re terrified of terrorism to the point that we seem willing to trade freedom and privacy for at least the veneer of security. And we all know what Ben Franklin had to say about that trade.

The increased oversight reflects the national-security establishment’s growing concern about threats to U.S. networks and the globalization of an industry in which equipment is increasingly made in China and other foreign countries, people familiar with the accords said.

The deals routinely require the companies to give the government streamlined access to their networks. At their most restrictive, they grant officials the right to require firms to remove certain gear and approve equipment purchases and directors.

So government is knee deep in telecom to the point that it even decides what equipment they can use and what directors they can appoint. While the government’s security concerns may have some validity, are the terms and restrictions too much?

If there’s any confirmation that the U.S. government has commandeered the Internet for worldwide surveillance, it is what happened with Lavabit earlier this month.

Lavabit is — well, was — an e-mail service that offered more privacy than the typical large-Internet-corporation services that most of us use. It was a small company, owned and operated by Ladar Levison, and it was popular among the tech-savvy. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden among its half-million users.

Last month, Levison reportedly received an order — probably a National Security Letter — to allow the NSA to eavesdrop on everyone’s e-mail accounts on Lavabit. Rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people,” he turned the service off. Note that we don’t know for sure that he received a NSL — that’s the order authorized by the Patriot Act that doesn’t require a judge’s signature and prohibits the recipient from talking about it — or what it covered, but Levison has said that he had complied with requests for individual e-mail access in the past, but this was very different.

So far, we just have an extreme moral act in the face of government pressure. It’s what happened next that is the most chilling. The government threatened him with arrest, arguing that shutting down this e-mail service was a violation of the order.

In essence, the NSA was telling Mr. Levison, via it’s threat to arrest him for not doing what it said, that it was the defacto “owner” of his enterprise. That he, in fact, had only one duty – comply. That he had no decision on how to proceed with what he apparently erroneously believed was his property until the NSA showed up.

Another example:

T-Mobile has been operating under a security agreement since 2001, when its parent company Deutsche Telekom AG, acquired VoiceStream Wireless Corp. for $50 billion. The agreement required that communications infrastructure be located in the U.S. and pass through a facility from which lawful electronic surveillance could be conducted.

It also prohibited the carrier from sharing communication data with foreign governments and allowed officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department to interview employees and inspect “communications infrastructure” upon “reasonable notice” in order to ensure compliance with the agreement.

Reasonable or unreasonable? Who is the defacto owner here?

The carrier also agreed to provide the two agencies with an updated list of principal network equipment, including routers, switches, base stations and servers, as well as manufacturer and model numbers for hardware and software, a provision that wasn’t included in the 2001 agreement.

Such inspection rights have improved the government’s understanding of how the networks are put together, said Andrew Lipman, a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP who has worked on about three dozen agreements over the last 20 years.

“The fact they have these rights to inspect gives them a window into equipment vendors that otherwise the government wouldn’t have,” he said. The government is using these agreements to “go to school” on network operations. “It’s like a shadow foreman at the factory,” he said.

That knowledge, he added, facilitates “the ability to—when appropriate—engage in record collection, data collection and wiretapping.”

And, of course, we all know that government would never abuse any of this access. I mean, it’s silly to think, for instance, that NSA employees would use their access to spy on their love interests, isn’t it?

In the final analysis we have to decide where the line is to be drawn in terms of the limits of the security state. Otherwise, as we’re discovering, it continues to creep into more and more areas and assume more and more powers. Are we really willing to give government … any government … the sort of power it has apparently assumed on its own? Are we willing to trust our privacy to an entity which has gone this deeply into controlling this one industry (and how deeply are they into others we don’t know about?)?

Security is important. Freedom and privacy are more important. More and more it seems our government has put security above both freedom and privacy. And that is contrary to the founding principles upon which this nation was founded. The question is, who will call a halt to the creeping security state?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/28/the-security-state-continues-its-advance/feed/60276744Who leaked the Snowden documents about Britain’s secret Middle Eastern base to a British paper?http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/23/who-leaked-the-snowden-documents-about-britains-secret-middle-eastern-base-to-a-british-paper/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/23/who-leaked-the-snowden-documents-about-britains-secret-middle-eastern-base-to-a-british-paper/#commentsFri, 23 Aug 2013 22:51:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=276202There are, supposedly, only two newspapers Snowden is working with: The Guardian and the Washington Post. (The NYT, wanting in on some of this Snowden action, announced today that it’s launched a partnership with the Guardian to that effect.) He’s been interviewed by others, but it’s only Greenwald and WaPo’s Bart Gellman, I believe, who have copies of what Snowden lifted from the NSA. Lo and behold, the Independent revealed last night that the UK is operating a base in the Middle East that it uses to intercept local communications. Money quote: “The Independent is not revealing the precise location of the station but information on its activities was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden.”

I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent. The journalists I have worked with have, at my request, been judicious and careful in ensuring that the only things disclosed are what the public should know but that does not place any person in danger. People at all levels of society up to and including the President of the United States have recognized the contribution of these careful disclosures to a necessary public debate, and we are proud of this record.

“It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post’s disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act.”

Note that Snowden doesn’t deny that the info on the base could have come from his documents. It might be in there, he seems to be suggesting, but he deliberately hasn’t leaked “harmful” information because this is about civil liberties, not about damaging western governments willy nilly. Which is nonsense: He’s leaked information before that has nothing to do with U.S./UK citizens being spied on and everything to do with routine espionage against foreign governments. But whatever. His theory, and Greenwald’s, is that this is a false flag op against him by the British government itself, leaking something which they knew the public would disapprove of in order to hurt Snowden’s and Greenwald’s credibility:

Greenwald, naturally, has a theory. He writes that Snowden claims the UK government itself leaked the documents. Greenwald then goes on to concoct some preposterous theory amplifying this idea, as if Whitehall would deliberately undermine its own nascent intelligence operations just to score some minor point against Edward Snowden. Contrary to Greenwald’s claims, exposing a compartmented program located in a sensitive country does not, actually, help them — in fact, by exposing sensitive operations in a sensitive location it does the very harm that necessitated classifying the program to begin with…

After his partner was detained, Glenn Greenwald threatened to release more documents exposing UK spying activities. He tried to walk it back — a courtesy he denies other journalists all the time — but the meaning was clear. Greenwald was mad, and he was going to punish the UK as a result.

Now, suddenly, a new tranche of documents exposing foreign espionage facilities — for which there is no legitimate public interest defense, since this station does not infringe on the civil liberties of British or American citizens — appears in the media, mysteriously without any of the bylines normally associated with such leaks.

Foust’s theory of the leak is conjecture, but then so is Greenwald’s. And Foust is right that the idea that the UK itself would sacrifice the secrecy of a sensitive base just to make Snowden look bad seems absurd. If the base is of so little use to them that they’d out it themselves, why’d they keep it secret in the first place? Beyond that, there’s no firm reason to believe that either the U.S. or British government knew that Snowden’s files contained material on the British base. To this day, the NSA still isn’t entirely sure what he took. Could be that the Brits discovered the material in the Snowden-related stuff they seized recently from Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, but that was all likely encrypted. Could they decrypt it that quickly? Could they decrypt it at all? Also, to think that Independent would pass on a bombshell story about UK authorities passing around their own copies of Snowden’s files to out their own intelligence hubs in order to write a mundane piece about a British spy center in the Middle East that surprises no one is hard to believe.

An exit question, then, for those who’ve been following Snowdengate day by day: To the best of your knowledge, who has access to Snowden’s treasure trove? Greenwald and Gellman, obviously, as well as Laura Poitras and Miranda. Wikileaks might have some access. Who else? Russian and Chinese intelligence could have lifted some or all of it, but who knows if they’ve decrypted it (did they even get it in encrypted form?) and there’s no reason why they’d feed it to the Independent. The NSA and British intel probably have some idea of what he took but evidently not the complete picture. Who else? A final nerve-wracking possibility raised by Foust is that someone in Snowden’s inner circle somehow lost control of part or all of the archive and now Mister X is leaking it against Snowden’s wishes. That’s the worst-case scenario for everyone, including Snowden (assuming he’s semi-serious about not trying to harm U.S./UK interests), since if this is a set up by the British they can at least be trusted not to leak stuff that’s too damaging to their own security. No such guarantee with Mister X. Maybe the genie’s out of the bottle.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/23/who-leaked-the-snowden-documents-about-britains-secret-middle-eastern-base-to-a-british-paper/feed/36276202Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/19/quotes-of-the-day-1471/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/19/quotes-of-the-day-1471/#commentsTue, 20 Aug 2013 02:41:11 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=275525 Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was on his way home to Brazil on Sunday when UK officials, citing a controversial terrorism law, detained him for 9 hours at London’s Heathrow airport. The Guardian’s report explains that Miranda was held for the maximum amount of time allowed by law under a provision, applicable only to airports and other border areas, that permits authorities to detain, search, and question individuals. During that time, according to Greenwald, Miranda was question about the Guardian’s reports on NSA data collection from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Officials took Miranda’s laptop, camera, memory sticks, game consoles, and DVDs before letting him go without charge. The Guardian reports that the paper is “urgently” seeking clarification from British officials on the reason for Miranda’s detainment.

***

According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, “fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders” (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, “most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour.” An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used “to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop “the terrorists”, and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

***

The journalist who first published secrets leaked by fugitive former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden vowed on Monday to publish more documents and said Britain will “regret” detaining his partner for nine hours…

“I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England, too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did,” Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio de Janeiro’s airport where he met [David] Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

Greenwald said in a subsequent email to Reuters that the Portuguese word “arrepender” should have been translated as “come to regret” not “be sorry for.”

“I was asked what the outcome would be for the UK, and I said they’d come to regret this because of the world reaction, how it made them look, and how it will embolden me – not that I would start publishing documents as punishment or revenge that I wouldn’t otherwise have published,” he said in the email.

***

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach…

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

During Miranda’s trip to Berlin, which the Guardian said it had paid for, he visited with Laura Poitras, an independent film-maker who was the first journalist to interact with Snowden. Poitras co-authored stories based on Snowden’s material for the Washington Post and the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Greenwald told the New York Times that Miranda went to Berlin to deliver materials downloaded by Snowden to Poitras and to acquire from Poitras a different set of materials for delivery to Greenwald, who lives with Miranda near Rio de Janeiro.

Greenwald said British authorities seized all electronic media, including data memory sticks, which Miranda was carrying. But Greenwald told the Forbes website that “everything” Miranda had “was heavily encrypted.”

***

Step one in this should be making sure the record is correct. It is false that Miranda was denied a lawyer — he refused a lawyer, which is a crucial detail. Far from being evidence of tyranny out of control, as Greenwald wants to argue, this suggests the British authorities were trying to provide his representation as the law allows, and he refused. That isn’t the UK’s fault, it is Miranda’s. Then there’s this:

“They treated me like I was a criminal or someone about to attack the UK … It was exhausting and frustrating, but I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

I wonder why the UK would think he was about to attack them? After the first round of leaks, which included substantial details of UK espionage operations, Greenwald said “The U.S. government should be on its knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden, because if something happens, all information will be revealed and that would be their worst nightmare.” And in fact, just this morning, he vowed that he would make the UK “sorry” for having questioned his partner.

So yeah: that’s totally unreasonable, I guess. Miranda mentions that he gave authorities the password to his computer, which might explain why he was detained for so long, if they were then searching for any evidence that he was carrying top secret documents with him. The Guardian, in this story, reports that he was ferrying documents for Greenwald and Poitras — a key detail omitted from earlier coverage.

***

“Because: journalism” is not a sufficient response. I don’t like how the Guardian put Miranda on its payroll, turning him into a courier of sorts and conferring on him the patina of the legal and traditional protections afforded to journalists. That’s sloppy tradecraft and it’s cruel to Miranda. Doing journalism makes you a journalist. As Joshua Foust points out, the transitive property does not apply. (I am not a corporate strategy consultant, and I would not be one if my spouse’s company suddenly paid for me to fly stolen documents to my husband somewhere.)

Greenwald is doing real journalism. If extra protections are afforded, they are afforded to him. If extra scrutiny is warranted, he should get it. I know the Snowden case is a boundary case, that it is of an echelon that other leak cases are not and that there are real first amendment equities involved. I also know that the government takes leaks of this magnitude — and considers the totality of what’s been leaked and what precedents it sets, not just the stuff we like (the U.S. stuff), but everything — terribly seriously. As all governments do, and have done, and will do. A separation between spouse and source is a foundational principle of how reporters approach complicated stories involving secrets and classified information. IF you do choose to involve your spouse, or you and your spouse work together, then you cannot reasonably complain that your partner was harassed for no reason whatsoever. Decisions have consequences.

***

Regardless, the way this story was reported only served to perpetuate the trend of journalistic smoke-and-mirrors employed by The Guardian and others — the vagueness and disingenuousness that feeds the roiling incredulity about all of this.

Additionally, the optics of the whole thing are unfortunate. By detaining Miranda to the very limit of the law, the U.K. only dumped a tanker truck of fuel onto the massive bonfire of outrage — it exacerbated the increasingly irrational freakout among civil libertarian activists and Greenwald acolytes. The use of the Terrorism Act won’t help either. Among other things, it serves to augment the hyper-paranoid conspiracy theory that the government might assassinate Greenwald or Snowden or both. Miranda was treated like a terrorist; the government kills terrorists with drones; ergo, well, you know. Thanks, U.K.

This reminds me of when the New Yorker’s John Cassidy said “I’m with Snowden,” and demanded journalists answer, “Which side are you on?”

Just as then, being on the side of the truth is, apparently, not an option here — the world is not a series of complex events, but a simplified bifurcation into “us” and “them,” and “them” always must be vilified as your enemy. I expect this sort of manicheanism from Beltway partisan rags, but not from high-brow magazines and ostensibly professional journalists… but that is, apparently, naive of me.

This is the sort of story that hits close to home. It can be deeply worrying when a loved one gets wrapped up in a project you’re working on — like a John Grisham novel or something. But the specifics here, especially how Greenwald and his employer deliberately involved said family member, also matter deeply to why it played out the way it did. That so many commentators not only cannot recognize that (the depressing majority of journalists commenting on this incident did not acknowledge such exculpatory information), but actively make comparisons to genuinely horrific police states or organized criminals that murder their own citizens (another common trope of Greenwald’s hyperbolic rhetoric about the U.S.), should matter.

***

I cannot decide if I am more annoyed at the Washington Post or more annoyed at the Obama administration for the way this latest cache of Snowden-leaked NSA documents is playing. I have now gone through the documents with some care, and I find both the Post‘s formulation of the story and the administration’s response to the leak mind-boggling…

There are also a fair number of database query errors—that is, typos, confusions of boolean terms like “and” and “or,” syntax errors, and the like. You know . . . mistakes. These mistakes are caught through a combination of automated checking, auditing, and self-reporting. In other words, the fewer than 3,000 incidents reported over the year in question involve the NSA’s own systems—and people—catching and correcting technical errors.

Even the section entitled “Significant Incidents of Non-compliance” (pp. 11-13) does not detail anything like any intentional violation of the privacy rights of Americans…

In other words, what this document shows is that among the billions and billions of communications the NSA interacts with every year, it has certain low rate of technical errors, many of them unavoidable, which it dutifully records and counts.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the story, based on an internal audit obtained by former Defense contractor Edward Snowden, in fact revealed “there is in place at the NSA a very strict oversight regime.”…

“Understanding the facts of this complicated policy is important,” Earnest said.